CategoryTools

April 17, 2020 — A month is a long time to stay on top of things. Here you’ll find an overview of everything we’ve been working on and have also enjoyed reading over the past month. Of course, you can always find us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and also stay updated with our RSS feed as well as our Smashing Newsletter (sent out every second week with all sorts of goodies!). Read more…

April 15, 2020 — React provides a few built-in Hooks like useState. You can also create your own Hooks to reuse stateful behavior between different components. The example below shows a counter whose state is managed using the useState() hook. Each time you click on the button, we make use of setCount() to update the value of count by 1. In this article, Adeneye David Abiodun covers the rules of React Hooks and how to effectively start using them in your projects. Please note that in order to follow this article in detail, you will need to know how to use React Hooks. Read more…

April 8, 2020 — In this article, Chidi Orji will create a set of API endpoints using Express from scratch in ES6 syntax, and cover some development best practices. Find out how all the pieces work together as you create a small project using Continuous Integration and Test-Driven Development before deploying to Heroku. Read more…

April 6, 2020 — Writing is a crucial skill every software developer should cultivate. And writing on your own technical blog can have immense benefits to your career as a software developer and help you cultivate your skills and expertise. Creating and hosting a technical blog provides an opportunity to do just that. In this article, Zara Cooper will take a look at how to deploy a blog for free and with minimal effort using Hugo and Firebase. Read more…

March 27, 2020 — You don’t need to know your trees from your dangling blobs. If you use Git every day and feel like it’s a juggling act, then here are some tricks and tips to help make your life a bit easier. There’s been a lot written about getting started with git, understanding how git works under the hood or techniques for better branching strategies. In this article, Shane Hudson will specifically target the stuff that just makes your life better in a small way. Read more…

March 25, 2020 — In Part 1, Paul explained the basics of the terminal, shared a few productivity hacks to get you started, and how to choose a code editor. In this part, he’ll continue with the topics of version control (Git), HTML and CSS, semantic code, and a brief introduction to some key engineering principles. Read more…

March 20, 2020 — Making your tables sortable in React might sound like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be too difficult. In this article, Kristofer Giltvedt Selbbekk is going to show you how to implement all you need to sort out all of your table sorting needs. By the end of this tutorial, you will have found a way to model your state, wrote a generic sorting function, and wrote a way to update what our sorting preferences are. After making sure everything is performant and refactored you will provide a way to indicate the sort order to the user. Read more…

March 19, 2020 — Houdini, an umbrella term for the collection of browser APIs, aims to bring significant improvements to the web development process and the development of CSS standards in general. Frontend developers will be able to extend the CSS with new features using JavaScript, hook into CSS rendering engine and tell the browser how to apply CSS during a render process. Houdini’s browser support is improving and some APIs are available for use today, so it’s a good time to become familiar with them and experiment. We are going to take a look at each part of Houdini, its current browser support and see how they can be used today using progressive enhancement. Read more…

March 18, 2020 — For the purpose of this two-part series of articles, we’re going to assume the answer for “Should designers code?” is “It depends.” If you’ve started and never finished courses in some online coding school — or if you’ve finished the courses but found it difficult to apply this style of learning in your day-to-day work, these two articles will provide a few different learning methods and will highlight different opportunities for their everyday application. In this first part of the series, we’ll take a look at getting comfortable with the command line and text editors. Read more…

March 17, 2020 — There isn’t a ton of mystery when it comes to what makes for an attractive and modern-looking design these days. What’s not always clear, however, is the usability aspect of it. In other words, have the pathways you’ve designed for users intuitive enough? The truth is, it’s all really just a guessing game unless you start getting user feedback early on. Thankfully, Indigo.Design has a usability testing solution to help us out. Read more…